Menu

Configuring your network to use faster, more reliable DNS servers

Typically, your ISP provides DNS services. In an ideal world, this would work well, as your ISP’s DNS server ought to be geographically close to your machine and should be able to perform look ups quickly. However, there are a number of reasons why you might want to use a public DNS server instead of your ISP’s server. The two big public DNS servers are OpenDNS and Google Public DNS.

Technically more sophisticated users may discover that manually setting the DNS servers on a computer allows that computer to circumvent the OpenDNS filtering. To prevent a machine from bypassing the OpenDNS filtering, you could configure the DNS servers directly on the router and then block all outgoing DNS requests to all DNS servers except the OpenDNS servers.

OpenDNS system status

It’s a good idea to be able to check the condition of your DNS server.

Seriously restricting internet access

What I really want to do is severely restrict internet access on a single machine on my LAN. For this machine, I want to manage a small whitelist of domains and block access to everything else. OpenDNS doesn’t seem to offer this type of functionality.